Pushkin memorial destroyed in Ukraine: mayor sees no politics in this

Aleksandr Pushkin in the village Mihaylovskoye by Nikolai Ge. (a fragment) 1875

03.07.2018, Zolochev.

The vandals, who destroyed a statue of Pushkin, had no political objectives, the city of Zolochev’s mayor, Igor Grinkov, believes. The mayor of the city of Zolochev, where the memorial was destroyed, wrote this on his Facebook page.

Despite the fact that the day before, according to Grinkov, the issue was raised as to rename Pushkin Square, the mayor insists that the vandals had no political motives.

“This is an act of vandalism. In Zolochev, vandals destroyed a Pushkin statue. I will not be surprised if the Russian media take advantage of this situation for their political goals. The city council members proposed that Pushkin Street be renamed after Boris Zolotnik. We conducted a survey, and the majority voted against this. Currently, the street is named after the Russian poet. Also, renaming the square was discussed,” Grinkov wrote in Facebook.

In the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, where no memorials to Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko have been destroyed, the act of vandalism committed in the Lvov region was called “medieval”.

On June 6, 2014, unidentified people tagged the A. S. Pushkin statue in Kharkov with graffiti.

In 2015, the law “on the condemnation of the communist and the Nazi regimes” was signed. The law demands, in particular, that cities and streets named after Russian and Soviet state figures be renamed.